aQtive bibliography

aQtive products are based on strong theoretical principles as well as practical experience. We are proud of our academic basis and ongoing research contributions. Here are some of the places featuring aQtive technology and products and also some of the academic work by ourselves and others which led towards the development of onCue and aQtiveSpace.

We hope this will be a valuable resource for those wanting to use aQtive technology in research work or student projects.

publications featuring onCue and aQtive

  A. Dix, R. Beale and A. Wood (2000).

Architectures to make Simple Visualisations using Simple Systems,
Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI2000, ACM Press, pp. 51-60

abstract || full paper (pdf)

onCue architecture overview and use as a visualisation interface

  A. Dix (1999).

Design of User Interfaces for the Web (invited paper),
User Interfaces to Data Intensive Systems UIDIS, Edinburgh 5th - 6th September 1999

abstract || full paper (pdf)

description of onCue as a transformative technology in the context of PopuNet

  A. Dix (1999)

Annotations a UI Perspective (unpublished panel presentation)

COOPIS'99, Edinburgh 2nd - 4th September 1999

talk outline

looks at an early version of vfridge!

  A. Dix, T. Rodden, N. Davies, J. Trevor, A. Friday, K. Palfreyman (1999).

Exploiting space and location as a design framework for interactive mobile systems
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), in press.

abstract || draft paper (pdf)

looks at architectural and design issues of context- and location-aware applications
onCue and aQtiveSpace feature as an example of context-aware architecture

internal reports

Obviously many of our internal reports are initially confidential, but as we release them we will make them available here. The first two of these are packaged as part of the developers/academic pack. The last has been available on the web for some time and forms part of aQtive's market vision.

  onCue "how it works", (html or pdf format)
  aQtiveSpace "how it works", (html or pdf format)
  PopuNET - pervasive, permanent access to the Internet, (html)

related work and theoretical basis

Agent and component-based architectures are a key theoretical background of our work.

  A. Wood (1998)

CAMEO: Supporting Agent-Application Interaction,

PhD Thesis (University of Birmingham, UK, 1998).

Andy's PhD work on the CAMEO component architecture was one of the main base points for the development of aQtiveSpace and onCue

  A. Wood, A. K. Dey and G. D. Abowd (1997).

CyberDesk: Automated Integration of Desktop and Network Services,

Proceedings of CHI'97, ACM Press, pp. 552-553.

full paper

the CAMEO architecture was used while Andy was visiting Gregory Abowd at Georgia Tech. to develop CyberDesk, a context-aware application framework

  A. K. Dey, G. D. Abowd, A. Wood (1998).

CyberDesk: A Framework for Providing Self-Integrating Context-Aware Services.
In Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces '98 (IUI '98), pp. 47-54, Jan, 1998.
full paper

another CyberDesk paper
this one appeared in an extended form in Knowledge-Based Systems (January 1999)

  A. Dix (1993).

An agent based architecture for groupware applications.

unpublished report, Computer Science Department, University of York.

Full paper

an early go at embodying status-event analysis (see below) within a distributed agent architecture

aQtiveSpace has its roots in status-event analysis. See Alan's pages on status-event analysis for a full set of references to this strand of work, but here are a few key papers. Gregory Abowd again features as a collaborator in this strand of work - thanks Gregory!

  A. Dix (1991).

Status and events: static and dynamic properties of interactive systems.

Proceedings of the Eurographics Seminar: Formal Methods in Computer Graphics, Ed. D. A. Duce. Marina di Carrara, Italy.
Abstract || full paper (html)

one of the first status-event analysis papers

  G. Abowd and A. Dix (1994).

Integrating status and event phenomena in formal specifications of interactive systems.
SIGSOFT'94, Ed. D. Wile. New Orleans, ACM Press. 44-52.
Abstract || full paper (compressed postscript)

a formal treatment of status-event analysis focusing on the inadequacy of standard notations to deal with both status and event phenomena and using examples from collaborative systems to drive the analysis

  A. Dix and G. Abowd (1996).

Modelling status and event behaviour of interactive systems.

Software Engineering Journal, 11(6) pp. 334-346.

abstract

an extended version of the previous paper.

  A. Dix (1998).

Finding Out - event discovery using status-event analysis
Formal Aspects of Human Computer Interaction FAHCI98, Sheffield, 5th&6th September 1998.
Abstract || full paper (pdf) || full paper (compressed postscript)

uses a semi-formal analysis to investigate the complex chains of cause and effect when events and status change propagate through a system
the separation of causality and initiative in this paper was an important point in the development of the current aQtiveSpace primitives